


Signals Between Two Satellites

by nostalgicatsea



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 21:49:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14839787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea
Summary: He hadn't allowed himself to dream of this, of Tony returning to him. Not when he had lost so much. Not when dreaming of the impossible would destroy him.But Tony was here, and for the first time since Thanos had wiped out half of the universe, Steve felt hope.





	Signals Between Two Satellites

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by [this gorgeous art](http://mrsgingles.tumblr.com/post/173682573075/youre-alive) by mrsgingles.

Steve didn’t dream and when he did, he didn’t remember.  
  
Numbness crept into every part of his life, a cold intravenous drip of anesthesia circulating through his veins and pulling him under, keeping his senses dulled even when he was asleep. At night he sank into nothingness and woke up hours later, washed ashore like driftwood with no idea how he got there.  
  
When he did dream, the few that he had were weightless.  
  
They were ash floating—  
  
He wrenched himself away from the image, his mind taking a jerky turn and speeding off course across uneven ground until a replacement brought him to a halt.    
  
_Wisps of smoke_ , he amended. They would dissipate as soon as he woke up.  
  
Or maybe silt.  
  
The water that had gently brought him to land would retreat, dragging the few pieces of dream detritus that had washed up with him back into the ocean, too swift for him to grab ahold of the remnants.  
  
Sometimes he managed to brush a few on their way back, but they were as lifeless and dull as he felt in his waking hours. Opaque flashes of gray, murky and unsaturated.  Fleeting glimpses that slipped through his outstretched fingers, leaving him alone on a remote shore once they were gone.  
  
So he knew this wasn’t a dream. It was too vivid.  
  
He would never dare to imagine this anyway, to let go like this even when he was asleep. It would destroy him more completely than anything else could.  
  
The ship docked far off in the distance, its gusting propellers cutting off as soon as it sank into the loamy soil. The grass swayed and then straightened. A ramp began to slide down and before he knew what he was doing, he shot forward, unsure of whether the fear that pumped through him like adrenaline came from bracing for another fight or from hoping, even when he tried so valiantly not to, that not everything had been lost.  
  
Tony descended on shaky legs, wan but alive, eyes wide with a fragile desperation that Steve couldn’t interpret but innately understood, and he was on fire, his lungs, throat, and eyes burning as he pushed himself forward.  
  
His muscles screamed awake as he ran.  
  
If he got to Tony this very second, if he immolated himself with all his grief, all his hope, all his love, all the things that he had kept locked up so as not to fall apart to reach Tony _right now_ , this would be real. It wouldn’t slip through his fingers like smoke.  
  
Like ash.  
  
But Tony stayed where he was, not disappearing as he staggered off the ramp and fell to his knees, his legs cutting out from under him as soon as he reached level ground.  
  
Relief and exhaustion set in as Steve reached him, traveling through dozens of distributaries branching out of his weary heart, a heady cocktail that left his limbs loose and weak.  
  
It was as though he had been sending out a distress signal all this time, too faint for him to notice until Tony had picked up on it from the depths of space and answered.  
  
His legs could no longer support his weight. He dropped to one knee and placed a hand on the ground for balance. The grass was wet under his fingers, the dirt cool and damp from the rain that had fallen that morning. _Petrichor_ , he registered as its fragrance reached him. It was spring. Nature moved on, indifferent to all death and destruction, catkins hanging heavily from branches and the flowers that Wanda had left behind beginning to unfurl their buds.  
  
And underneath it all, this close to the man he had been afraid he would never see again, a scent that Steve could only describe as _Tony_.  
  
Real. This was real.  
  
A ghost of a warning flashed, then blinked out.  
  
_Don’t touch him. You don’t get to have that._  
  
Another flash.  
  
_He’ll know._  
  
The warning was there and gone, a feeble flicker that barely stirred him. His worries were so insignificant now. Rejection was easy to deal with and hatred and revulsion, condescension and pity, mattered little when Tony was here, alive. Half the universe was gone, and Tony had somehow made it.  
  
Steve skimmed the dark purple bruise under Tony’s eye, then his cheek, and then his neck. Tony’s pulse beat steadily under his fingers where he held him, and Steve finally caved in on himself, unable to hold himself up any longer. He rested his forehead against Tony’s and shut his eyes, falling forward, falling into him.  
  
“You’re alive,” he breathed out, wet and ruined.  
  
A sigh shuddered out of them both, a shared exhale that trembled between them until Tony placed a hand against the blackened star on his chest and it broke, returning to their lungs a ragged sob.  
  
Tony’s touch felt like a mirror memory, a reverse echo of the time he had touched Tony’s chest all those years ago, searching for a sign of life after he had fallen to Earth from space.  
   
A tear spilled onto the hand he had on Tony’s neck, then another, the first warning drops of a downpour. Steve opened his eyes to see Tony’s closed ones, his long eyelashes dewed. His mouth was parted as though he had something to say.  
  
Often, during long nights on the run in cramped motels and abandoned warehouses, he had wondered whether they would know what to say to each other if they ever met again.  
  
He had his answer.  
  
As Tony continued to cry silently, speechless for once, Steve thought they understood each other better than they had ever thought they would.  
  
Pain bound them together, loss, apology, and relief their lingua franca.  
  
Love, he thought, holding Tony close to him and breaking, finally, as Tony returned the embrace, tightly like no one could make him let go, like he was afraid someone would rip Steve away from him. He buried his face in Tony’s hair, his breath hitching as Tony shook in his arms, great sobs racking his entire body.    
  
“I know,” Steve told him, tears warm against his cheeks. “I know.”

 

His words came back to him as he hovered in the doorway, tracing every line of Tony’s body, making an inventory of all his injuries, all the ways that he had changed since they had last been together.  
  
_“I don’t like the idea of you rattling around a mansion by yourself.”_  
  
The compound was expansive in its silence. The others had greeted Tony and his companion—“Nebula,” Tony had said as she stood next to him, stoic but for the tightness that formed around her eyes when Rocket stopped in his tracks, frozen with grief now that his worst nightmare was a certainty with their arrival—and stayed with them until one by one, they had gone out, throughout the compound and into the city, to do everything that they could to prevent the world from dissolving into more chaos than it already was in.  
  
“Was it like this when we left?” he wanted to ask. This empty? This dead?  
  
He had called this home when Sam had asked him where they were going, but maybe it hadn’t been one for a long time. What he had yearned for no longer existed. The compound had turned into a cold, unwelcoming mausoleum while he was gone, and Rhodes had looked so small when they walked in, swallowed up by the vast emptiness of the room, lonely even with the holographic figures that filled it.  
  
He had never missed Tony as much as he did then, finally returning home from a war that had felt endless to find out that it was no longer home, not with the person who made it one gone.  
  
Home had been purpose. Then, as he wandered nomadically and the inability to settle anywhere for too long wore him down, a place to return to at the end of the day, somewhere safe where he belonged and could finally rest. Family, despite having told himself that he was fine being on his own and Tony that the Avengers were more Tony’s family than his.  
  
And then when he had all three, something to fight for again and the team reunited and at the compound once more, and home still didn’t feel like a home: Tony. Tony, who was gone. Tony, whom he had hurt so deeply and realized he loved too late.  
  
But Tony was back and despite all the deaths that covered the compound like a heavy shroud and the sorrow that weighed Steve down, it felt…not like he was home but like he could finally breathe, as though maybe now that they were with each other again, now that Tony was here, they could figure out a path forward together, as lost and damned as they were.  
  
Hope wasn't a plan, Steve thought, looking at Tony, but there couldn’t be one without it.  
  
“The end of the world and here we are,” Tony said, not turning to look at him. “Still alive after it ended.” He gazed at the wall, his eyes unseeing. Thousand-yard stare. That was what they had called it after the war. It was an apt phrase; Tony was far away, somewhere isolated and unreachable. “So many people died,” he added softly. There was something in his voice, a suggestion of self-recrimination that leached through.  
  
Steve crossed the room and sat down on the bed next to him. “You can’t blame yourself for something like that. What Thanos did…it was random.”  
  
But it was futile, trying to provide assurance. Cold comfort. He knew how Tony felt even though it was irrational. Thanos would have called the culling fair and objective, but it wasn’t. Not when he had cheated death time and time again, not when he always survived and others didn’t, and not when Sam and Bucky and T’Challa, Wanda and Vision, and all those who had died hadn’t had a chance.  
  
_Why not me? Why them instead of me?_  
  
His halfhearted attempt at consolation broke Tony out of his fugue.  
  
“No, see. I was supposed to live,” he said. “Strange made sure of it.” Bitterness bled through all the way, his dark eyes glittering with its heat. “Told me it was the only way as he handed Thanos the Time Stone. And then they all—the kid—” His hands shook, and he clenched them to stop the tremors, though he took care not to look at them.  
  
Steve wondered how long it took for Tony to scrub the kid’s ashes from his skin. If part of him had refused to do that at first, to get every last bit of him out from underneath his fingernails, because it was all he had left of him.  
  
He had stayed in the shower long after Bucky’s remains had washed down the drain.  
  
“Fourteen million. That’s how many timelines there were where this doesn’t end happily.”  
  
“But this is the one where it does. It means we have a chance,” Steve said. And as Steve did, he found himself believing in it. All of them had sleepwalked through the past few days, going through the motions mechanically as they struggled to come to terms with what had happened, but the hope that had fluttered awake inside him with Tony’s return grew stronger with his words. For the first time since Thanos had left Earth victorious, he was filled with a sense of renewed purpose.  
  
“I don’t know what to do,” Tony replied, his voice breaking on the last word.  
  
“You got out of Afghanistan building something out of nothing. Out of scraps. We’ll—”  
  
“We don’t even have scraps. Jesus, Strange kept me alive and for what? All my plans—” Tony cut himself off, pressing his lips together, his breathing uneven. “There’s nothing. I have nothing. Not a single clue to just point us in the right direction.”      
  
“Not yet, but this isn’t all on you. Strange said this was the only way and if he saw that, then he saw that the rest of us survived too.” He covered Tony’s shaking hand with his, loosening Tony’s grip on the blanket to slip his fingers under Tony’s palm and hold his hand. “This time, you have us. You’re not doing this alone. We’ll figure it out together.”  
  
He had a moment to wonder whether he had gone too far when Tony tensed, but Tony didn’t remove his hand and, after a moment, replied.  
  
“All I could think of was you, after,” he said, looking somewhere to the right of him. “Everyone here could have died a-and I wasn’t…I didn’t want to think about that. I couldn’t. So I kept thinking about how I needed to fix this. Over and over again, and all I could think of when I did was you. If no one else—the one person who couldn’t be dead…I needed you to be alive.” He swallowed hard, turning away. “I need _you_ ,” he ended, his voice raw.  
  
Steve wondered at that, at what Tony meant. He wasn’t sure if Tony even knew.  
  
He didn't think it mattered.  
  
His answer was the same regardless.  
  
“You have me. Always. In this and in everything else,” he said softly, and he meant it in all the ways he could mean it, in all the ways that Tony needed him.  
  
Fourteen million to one, he thought as Tony intertwined their fingers, and though the chance of failure was high and they were going in blind, he couldn’t help but believe, now that they had each other.  
  
Hope, he thought as Tony turned to look at him, exhausted and afraid and beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> The prequel is [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663169)


End file.
